


No Species

by rokhal



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Conditioning, Dark Character, Dog Dean, Episode: s03e11 Mystery Spot, Failed Genetics Experiment Sam, Gen, Human Gabriel, Mad Science, Psychological Torture, Sadness, Tears, anguish, depressing fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 01:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sam is an abomination of science against nature and Gabriel is the animal behaviorist tasked with breaking his spirit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Species

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old one, but I like it.
> 
> To Hillary, because she was a real rabbit.

White walls, white coats, pens, clip-boards, dry-erase boards, rustling paper, and everywhere the smell of Science. Science smells like anything, like everything, like BO from the armpits of a technician's scrub shirt as he rolls canisters of monkey chow and dog food toward the big gorilla-proof cage in the east wing, where Dean the Methuselah Dog and Sam the Crabby Menace are housed. Gabriel follows the taller minion, white coat flapping with his strides, and grins when he catches Sam eyeing him from atop a smooth-worn pine bench.

“Hiya, Sammy!”

The tech fills Sam's scoop with the monkey chow, and edges up to the bars. He doesn't need to worry yet. Sam won't attack before Dean has his food – probably.

Sam is a problem. Gabriel had known he'd be a problem from the moment Zazzie cracked open his lab's creche and revealed that he'd been growing arthropod-baby chimeras to get a plasma donor for his immunology experiments. There was no way that thing was less than fifty percent human, no matter how much tweaking the humanoid parts had gotten before he'd assembled the embryos.

Sigma 004AKA83 #9 HFCI was the one chimera that didn't have bug parts where he needed human parts or vice versa and had lasted more than two weeks without life support. He wasn't bilaterally symmetrical or anything, didn't fit together quite right, but as he'd survived and begun to roll around his pen, begun to stagger back and forth on one long leg with joints in the wrong places, a hand, a talon, and a weak stunted leg with clawed toes, he'd become, in Gabriel's mind, a success. The question was whether the labs should have produced him in the first place.

The first mistake was naming the critter. No one knows quite where the name came from; the Ph.Ds blame the techs and the techs blame the Ph.Ds, but everyone agrees that giving a human name to a humanoid organism is a recipe for disaster.

Sam has grown from a stumbling nightmare with a child's face that drove three techs to terminal moral crises, to two-hundred pounds of restless cunning with inexplicable social delicacy and kind yellow eyes that could lull anyone but a seasoned warden into letting down their guard around him. Last month, Paul suffered a depressed skull fracture and a broken humerus when Sam flung him against a wall during a routine blood draw in an unexpected bid for escape. Since then, they'd begun darting and sedating Sam for medical procedures. In a week, he's grown as vicious and hazardous as Steven Seagal on a navy ship full of terrorists.

Somehow, Gabriel has become the go-to guy for behavior problems. Sam's behavior is now his problem.

The tech with the food loads Dean's dish and backs away. Sam tracks the movement with his whole head, smiling slightly as the tech pales and rushes back for the abandoned food canisters.

The smile isn't right. Not that it's creepy, for a smile on a human face with weird eyes and warped limbs with patches of mottled orange exoskeleton, but that it's a human smile. Gabriel stepps up to the bars, well within grabbing range if Sam wants to clear the distance and put his good arm through, and fingers the stun gun in his pocket.

Sam wasn't raised by humans. In his – Gabriel might as well call a spade a spade here – his childhood, Sam's handlers had worn disposable face masks and were discouraged from playing with him. The transgenic dog was his sole companion and nurturer. Predictably, Sam had learned a host of canine vocalizations and mannerisms, which persisted into his adulthood, but now that he'd been moved out to the big cage and biosecurity is less of a concern, now that uninitiated lab monkeys and lookie-lous can wander past at will, staring and waving at him, he's started to pick up some researcher mannerisms. They aren't just mimicry. That amused smile at the retreating tech, this shuttered curiosity, these are subconscious. Sam is reacting to humans as if he, too, were a human.

Dean trots into the room, claws clicking, ears up, tail flagging boisterously over his back. He leans against the backs of Gabriel's knees, sniffs his pockets for treats, and accepts a few seconds of quality scratching under his collar before he trots to the RFID gate, bumps his chip against the scanner, and darts into Sam's cage, the double-doors clanging down behind him. Dean and his littermates are an unqualified success: big, smart, well-adjusted, field-quality German Shepherds that ought to still be going strong well into their seventies, K-9s that will retire when their handlers retire. Dean will still be the lab mascot after a third of the staff is dead and cremated.

Dean distracts Sam. He dips to his elbows, growling, and Sam growls back, his grasshopper leg ratcheting into position before launching him forward over a body length. Sam takes the landing with a roll onto one armored shoulder; he's not exactly put together like a gymnast. He hooks Dean's foreleg with his talon, and Dean puts up a token resistance before lunging at him, gnawing and slobbering on his throat while Sam scratches under his collar with his humanoid hand and buries his face in Dean's fur.

Gabriel releases the stun gun and hooks his thumb on his pocket, watching. For an instant, the abominations against nature pause, Dean staring him down with a wolf's stillness, Sam with a man's judgment.

He leaves for the control room. There should be some interesting security footage.

 

*******

 

Dean likes to bump people. The military trainer who picked up his littermates frowned about it, said it was a dominance thing and an unacceptable habit, but everyone likes Dean, and no one's going to whack him on the nose for a little fur stuck to their legs, at least not while anyone's looking. So a greeting from Dean is a cold slobbery nose on your wrist and a manly shove to the back of your legs.

Dean also likes to roll in things, which is more of a problem, because when it's not spilled trash he's rolling in, it's a biohazard or a dye or a reagent. Carpet gets steam-cleaned, Dean christens it in fur. Tech drops cigarette ash off his shoes, Dean sniffs it out and picks it up like he's starting a grunge collection.

The first thing Dean does when he wanders back into Sam's cage, before he eats, even, is let Sam sniff him.

There's video feeds throughout the complex. Dean is easy enough to track with his RFID tag; Sam is even easier because there's a single fish-eye lens that covers his entire enclosure.

When Dean is out and about, usually in the morning when everyone bustles around coming to work, at noon when everyone is wandering out for lunch break, and in the evening when everyone is heading home, Sam tends to engage in self-directed behaviors, elaborate games, and stereotypies. He might stare at his forelimbs side-by-side, the hand and the talon. He often cracks his back against the bench or massages his hip. He has a pattern that can last fifteen minutes at a time where he chooses a point in the center of his cage, leaps to it, landing on his talon and his bad leg, skuttles carefully back to his starting point, turns, and repeats. In footage from when he was younger, a technician had marked a two-hour segment in which Sam did nothing but crawl across the cage from corner to corner, trying out different gaits while Dean leaned against him and licked his ears.

Recent footage has Sam standing upright on his long leg, talon locked around the bars of the cage, staring down at himself, at his hand. His lips move steadily, and Gabriel feels a pit opening in his guts.

He turns to the security manager. “Fix up some audio.”

 

*******

 

It's another two days before the microphone goes in, a week before Sam finally gets enough privacy to act out his little fantasies, and they get audio.

Sam makes dog noises when he's around Dean. He's pretty good at it; Dean's been talking to him since he was a baby. Sam grew up with people talking at him, over him, and around him, but never replying to any of his own vocalizations, according to his records. The last time he'd tried was when he was six.

No one had thought he'd be talking to himself.

On the video, Sam is standing on his strong leg again, bracing himself against the bars, looking for anything like a partial amputee splashed with orange paint and viewed through a bent lens. He's always been a freakish critter, like one of those two-legged puppies they find on TV every so often, riveting in the feat of balance and athleticism he performs just in getting up and moving around, unnatural even when there's no natural to compare him to. But Sam's trying. He's trying to be something.

On the audio, he vocalizes:

“Gonow. Cumnow. Idanow. Ida-go. Ida-come. Ida-still.”

Ida is one of the regular techs who would call Sam from his cage into the adjoining medical pen for bleeding. She'd requested a transfer after Sam had almost killed Paul.

“Paul-still. Paul-go. Sam-go. Gowowfurlunge. Goout-ferlunch. Dean-gowow-ferlunch. Sam-gowow-ferlunch.”

It's pretty far from conjugations, but it's pretty far from parroting, too.

“Doctor-come. Doctor-shoot. Shoot-doctor-shot-doctor-shot-still.”

Give or take the subject or the verb, that doesn't sound very promising. Doesn't sound much like an animal, either. Sam has been practicing for a speech.

 

*******

 

Gabriel sends in a progress report on Sam. It's short.

_You're not going to like it,_ he says. _Keep the meeting closed-door or we'll all be in deep doodoo._

 

*******

 

“I thought you were Mr. Positive Reinforcement, Mr. Wizard,” drawls Allie, his long fingers hooked spiderlike around his steaming coffee mug in the closed conference room. “What's all this . . . negativity?”

“It's perspective. Believe me, there ain't a carrot we can legally, feasibly give that'll get Sammy to roll over like a good dog,” Gabriel announces. “He's a crab-man who knows what he wants. Freedom. Rampaging in the streets. Heads on pikes, starting with Zazzie's. He won't go in for the small potatoes.”

“Dr. Loklear,” Dr. Frigg sighs, resettling the nose-piece of her glasses. It was her tell for impending ethical compromise. She freezes him in her tired, wounded gray eyes.

“Just fix it, right?” Gabriel snaps. “Hey, don't feel bad. Those darts'll eventually kill him, and we wouldn't want to just strap him down, it'd be hell to keep the pressure sores under control.”

“I'm not judging you!” she groans. “I just want you to do what you think is best for Sa – for the specimen.”

“Technically, he's not a specimen if he doesn't have a species,” Gabriel mutters.

Azazel coughs theatrically into his fist. “He's the last of his species.”

“I get it,” Gabriel insists through gritted teeth. “I'm not saying we can't do this, we gotta get Sam bled and tractable. Non-negotiable. But to do that, we gotta change how we've been handling him, and most of us are really not going to like what that means.”

 

*******

 

Dean greets him as he leaves the conference room, and Gabriel snags his monogrammed leather collar. “Hold on, there, bucko,” he scolds as Dean tries to pull away. He twists the collar, locking it up hard behind Dean's ears, grips the dog with a knee under his chest and his arms wrapped around him, and sniffs his fur like Sam does.

Dean needs another bath. He smells like rank dog dandruff, but also like bathroom sanitizer, printer toner, agar, old banana peel, and that obnoxious cologne Jove uses. It's subtle, and a bit hard for the human nose to make sense of, but if it's what Sam's got, it's what Sam's got. Dean's claws are tense, skidding on the linoleum, and when Gabriel releases him, he bolts down the hall, pausing to glare at him before he disappears down a corner.

The next time he walks by the cage, Sam and Dean snarl at him.

 

*******

 

Gabriel gets the lab a new mascot. It's a pedigree German Shepherd, a little smaller and dumber and a lot shorter-lived than Dean, but it's friendly enough.

He deactivates Dean's door access. Dean bangs his shoulders against the scanner in Sam's cage for a while, before staring at the gate with a betrayed expression. Sam thumps him reassuringly in the chest and tries to force the door, but eventually they give up. The lab gets used to the new Shepherd trotting around trying to eat their shoelaces, and Dean gets used to being confined in Sam's cage.

Sam has been darted with blowguns. He knows how they work and where they're pointing, but he's never seen a rifle or a pistol. Gabriel hauls in a half-dozen hay bales and some ply-wood and sets up a shooting range right next to Sam's cage. He shoots paper targets, cardboard, an old pair of rubber boots, and throws the perforated scraps in for Sam to poke at. Sam seems to understand what the gun is, but he doesn't see all the implications yet.

Gabriel swings down to Serology, borrows one of the white rabbits they keep for plasma – generic versions of Sam's job – and carries it up to the shooting range under his coat, wincing occasionally as it digs in its claws and nibbles his shirt through to the skin. He sets it on the target ledge and shoots it in the chest.

The rabbit leaps and convulses, long legs kicking, eyes popping out of its little skull, jaws chomping on froth, and when it's wound down and still enough to get a grip on, Gabriel flings it through the bars next to Sam's feet. Dean pounces on it, full of doggy glee, and starts gnawing on its face and licking the blood, but Sam stares at Gabriel with wide shocked eyes, the wheels turning in that too-human brain.

Sam understands death. Every month or so, Azazel feeds him a live goat. Sam knows.

 

*******

 

Animals, dogs and crabs and humans, are always smarter and dumber than anyone ever guesses. To get an intellectual handle on a concept, all anyone needs is one example, one sentence, one read-through, but that's only half the learning: to learn forever, deep down, to form a belief in their soul that will guide them from the sickness in their gut, that takes repetition. Training.

Gabriel calls Dean over to the medical pen one day and lets him in. He lures him into a carrier with a slice of pizza – tough going, since Dean is pretty suspicious for a dog – and rolls him out on a hand-truck to stay in a civilian kennel for a week. Give him a taste of how real dogs live.

He sets up a projector screen outside Sam's cage, and introduces him to the marvel of live CCTV. He's seen human kids figure out the video camera's location slower than Sam does: he goggles at the image, at the non-mirror mirror, then shuffles from side to side, and finally waves his arm through the air until it points up at the innocuous black lens overhead. The look on Sam's face when he realizes someone's been watching him his entire life – the snarl, the crushed crinkling of his brow, the sad little blush – that's priceless. And it's on film.

Seven beagles from drug safety testing no longer have kidneys. Gabriel called in some favors and won the honor of sending them off to the grand old foxhunt in the sky, with a bang.

Gabriel starts with a film.

He's proud of the film. Some of the footage was hell to cut through, boring-boring-boring soundless shots of the drones who populate the labs and weird doggy obsessions that no one could possibly understand: A Day In The Life Of Dean. Other footage was hell to locate, culled from the back-up data of the Censored Web, and that was hell to watch, too: everything horrible that could happen to a dog, from K-9s getting stabbed to family pets getting pancaked to pit bulls getting prodded into a frenzy in their cages. Some of the film isn't ready yet. Hasn't been recorded.

Sam watches. Curiosity is going to kill him. He's never seen the corridors of the labs, and as much as Dean and Dean's weird-smell collection have been the highlight of his days, Dean's privileges and Dean's social circles were a mystery. He watches for seven eye-wateringly dull hours, absently popping kibbles of monkey chow like a kid eating popcorn.

Gabriel cuts to the trauma segment. This has sound: whines and howls, whimpers, snarls, human shouts, gunshots, screeching tires. Sam goes live-wire.

None of these dogs are Dean, and Sam knows that, but he also knows that they're dogs, like Dean. Sam howls and snarls with them, face twisted in helpless rage. Sam's first exposure to film was CCTV this afternoon, and what he learned was that film was real. He's a smart cookie, but he's not suspicious enough. He buys that this instant, in real time, dogs are in terrible pain, and he is watching them through shaky cell-cams and grainy security footage.

Gabriel shuts off the film at the end of the first dog fight. Can't use up all the good material the first day. He walks out, walks down to the makeshift ICU where the terminal beagles are on dialysis, and grabs himself a dog. He carts it to Sam's cage, convinces it to sit – _sit_ – _staaaay_ in front of the hay bales, nods to Sam, and shoots it in the head.

Sam shrieks, pounding his legs against the cage, snarling and bellowing. The dog twitches a little and slumps to the floor, a glazed puzzled look in its one remaining eye, brains sludging out through its opposite ear.

Gabriel kills the lights and walks out, leaving Sam sobbing and howling in the cage.

He still has editing left to do. He's always had a problem with procrastination.

 

*******

 

The next day, he picks at some paragraphs on his latest grant application, interrogates some grad students, and generally takes all kinds of credit for other people's work. Fruits of his past labors. By noon, Sam's been in the dark for sixteen hours. He puts his cell on vibrate and heads back to the cage with the latest film.

Another Day In The Life Of Dean. Sam watches with the same thirst, but more dread. Another shock film follows, which Sam watches with wide eyes, quick eyes as he sees the sun, children, streets, cars, and trees for the first time, in between the gut-churning images of suffering dogs. Gabriel is essentially introducing a four-year-old to modern America through slasher films.

He retrieves another confused, tired beagle. Sam latches onto the bars, heaves himself to his full height, and bellows, “No!”

Gabriel says “Yes,” and shoots it.

 

*******

 

By day three, Gabriel's gofer has recorded enough whining from Dean's temporary home to mix a sound-track for Sam to go to sleep to.

 

*******

 

On day four, Gabriel does some serious fast-talking to keep the ethics committee off his back. He wins. He shows the next film, kills the next dog, lets Dean, safe in his kennel on the other side of town, whimper Sam to sleep.

 

*******

 

He runs out of film and out of beagles. On the seventh day, Sam is wrecked. His yellow eyes are sunken, he's stopped sleeping, and the pigment on his carapace is faded and dull. He watches Gabriel with a flat insectile stare. If Gabriel stumbled into range, he'd lose his throat.

For the last image, Gabriel walks out of the room and sets the projector on a timer. He heads up to the monitor room, enters the new password he'd put on Sam's camera, and watches.

The fish-eye stretches the enclosure oddly, with a smudge down at the bottom of the screen representing Sam, and a bright line at the top of the screen for the projector set. Gabriel selects his areas of interest and lets the computer pull the images back into shape.

Sam has pressed himself against the back of the bars. His expression is neutral. Gabriel can't tell what species he's feeling like now; whatever it is, it's been squashed down.

The film shows a long row of narrow runs of frantically yapping dogs, your typical kennel with nothing going on except a little separation anxiety. Three rows from the end, and there's Dean, sprinting back and forth, barking his head off.

Sam barks and vaults for the front of the cage, blinking out of view on the bottom enhancement and reappearing in the view of the projector screen. He clings to the bars, rigid with tension, panting through bared teeth. His talon and the claws of his long leg click faster and faster as Gabriel walks onscreen, out from the kennel and into Dean's run.

Dean stops running and turns his back to the cameraman, facing Gabriel with his ears and his legs all tense, his tail held high and slowed to a menacing beat. Gabriel reaches into his jacket and draws out the gun.

Zoom to face. Eyebrow raise, like 007. Cut to black.

 

*******

 

On the infrared, Sam doesn't move for an hour. Gabriel leaves him in the dark for three days.

 

*******

 

On the tenth day, Gabriel turns the lights back on, lets the new tech reintroduce Dean through the medical pen, and watches as Sam latches his arms around the confused dog like a huge, mutated baby chimp. Dean tries to lick him, but Sam just runs his hand over his body, searching for wounds. Dean tries to play, but Sam just stares.

 

*******

 

“Dramatic,” says an irritating nasal voice from the enclosure doorway. Alistair.

Gabriel puts on a grin. “I know, right?”

“You have a yen for drama,” Alistair purrs. “You take simple tasks and make them complicated.”

“You coulda done better?” Gabriel challenges, defending, in spite of himself, his ability to psychologically destroy a thinking being.

Alistair shrugs. “There's too many cameras in this place,” he murmurs, and slinks back out to the hallway.

 

*******

 

Gabriel had always liked Sam, if only for the indomitable will it took for him just to balance on his mismatched limbs, and the way he freaked out the norms with his angel face and spider walk and sickly yellow eyes. He still likes Sam. He doesn't want Sam to kill anyone, and he doesn't want Sam to get out – it's not like there's a natural habitat anywhere out there waiting for him.

He also likes Sam because he's an impudent little punk. Sam was born and raised in the lab, he'd never known anything else, and still he'd gotten it into his head that he deserved better, that if he reached for it, he could have better. He saw what he thought was a chance, and he took it. That takes balls. Gabriel's known humans who aren't so lucky.

Now he knows what Sam's made of. Sam knows what he's made of. There is no more uncertainty in this strange fellowship of hate. It's an intimacy rarely shared.

Sam _knows_.

Gabriel lowers the pistol at Dean's head.

Sam edges obediently into the medical pen.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was for a prompt on spiffy_things from robotlizards, as follows:
> 
> SPN; Biopunk; Gabe/Sam; In which Sam is a very, very failed experiment. Like Ripley clone (sort of NSFW) failed.
> 
> Original Note: A chimera is an animal grown from an embryo that contains two different cell sources. At the eight cell stage, embryos are knocked apart into their separate stem cells. Some of these cells can be cultured separately for a generation or two, and can be altered to include transgenes before they're recombined into new embryos. Mixing an embryo for a white animal with one for a black animal produces an animal with large irregular blotches. Usually the subjects are mice, grown in the hopes of breeding mature animals with only the altered cell type from their progeny. Here, the reasons are more foggy. Immunology has a lot of fog.  
> Lab animals aren't mistreated, ever - there are very strict rules about that - except when they're being poisoned or purposefully made lame for the service of science. Today's cruelty makes tomorrow's miracles possible. It's sad, but that's the way it is.
> 
> Sam, according to Supernatural canon, might actually be sort of a chimera. He's only got one tissue type from Azazel - blood - but who knows, those little demon lymphocytes might have stuck around and distributed throughout his entire body. This could certainly explain why he was immune to Croatoan.  
> On the metaphysical level, I've always thought of Sam's powers being something pathological, grafted on. He couldn't control them, they make him bleed from the hypertension, and when he develops them, they cause personality changes. In a vague way, bug-monster Sam is an interpretation of some levels of Sam's inner self. (It's also a tribute to that episode of SGA where John Sheppard turns into a bug. It doesn't get much better than that.)


End file.
